First off, a huge thank you for your interest, comments, and support for Seed! It's really been a breathtaking 2017. And, now that it's the new year, we thought it was the perfect time to update you on the current progress of the project.

I sat down with Klang's Chief Creative Officer, Ívar Emilsson, to talk about the latest features in production and how 2018 looks for development.

So Ívar, it's been roughly four months since we previously spoke. What's changed during this development period?

We’re just starting our fourth milestone! In our previous milestone, we built the foundations of the world in which the Seedlings live, making it work at scale, experimenting with the terrain, etc.

Our ultimate goal is to push the boundaries of how big single-shard virtual worlds can be, supporting hundreds of thousands of players and millions of entities. We began by creating a single biome 100 square kilometer island, so we can nail down the fidelity (amount of different types of landforms, vegetation and other resources) before creating the rest of the world. This is still an ongoing process.

We also worked on improving the character AI system allowing us to easily author new character needs and desires, as well as interactions to fulfill them. We also worked on implementing the very beginnings of the character health system, allowing characters to get various ailments that affect their abilities.

Our team is also growing, we’ve managed to fill various roles across multiple disciplines feels really great to be surrounded by these talented people!

How has the reception been since the last dev update?

It's been incredible! We've seen our community grow rapidly over the past few months, especially after we published the Pre-Alpha Footage Teaser.

There's been a lot of great feedback and intrigue, which has been extremely insightful and inspiring for us. We can't wait to show off more in the very near future!

Any exciting features being worked on right now?

We’re currently working on a few different tracks. All very exciting! We’re continuing work on the world, making the single biome island as close to the final fidelity as possible. Seeing the world come together is really amazing, and full of exciting challenges.

We’re currently also doing more prototyping of how colonies would work on a larger scale. Instead of focusing on detail such as what happens inside a residential building, how it’s built and all the interaction that takes place within it, we’re taking a step back and simulating a large town, where each building has a purpose. It’s kind of like creating an elaborate ant farm. We’ll both get insight into how the AI will behave at more “zoomed out” level and at the same time create requirements / goals for the building system, which we’ll be iterating on in the next milestone.

Finally, we’re building more on the character individuality, by introducing skills and traits, allowing characters to specialize in certain fields.

How does 2018 look for the production of Seed?

We’re really trying to focus on the core gameplay, and building the right tools in the right order. This requires a lot of roadmapping and constant iteration of our plans as we discover things. So far it’s been going great. Now with more manpower both in production and development, we hope to get the game into a fun state, where we can start letting small groups of players help us test and further the development process, hopefully towards the end of the year.

As we're now starting a new year, and bringing the Seed community along with us on this journey, is there anything you'd like to say to our readers?

Yes! We're so grateful for your interest in Seed! There's a long road ahead and we can't wait to bring you with us every step of the way!

Once again, thank you so much for your support. We have a lot planned for the game and the community for 2018; this is only the beginning!